Resources for Information Skills
Section contents page Introduction Choosing the right tool for the job Search engines When to use information gateways and specialist databases Google Access to the invisible web Google development How to get the best out of Google Why not always Google? Other search engines Meta-search engines Why use a directory? Overview Summary
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Google Development

Google has been continuously upgrading their search engine with numerous improvements and additional features. The following are a few examples of new features on offer:

1. Google blog search

It is a specialised service provided by Google to search blogs which are published online over the internet. The Blog Search includes Blogger, Live Journal and Weblog. This has dramatically increased the self publication, as a part of user generated information.

"Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, etc." (Google Blog FAQ, 2010)

Google offer Google Blog Search to help your search and Blogger to allow you to set up your own blog. They provide an online tutorial to help you with this.

2. Google news

Is a free news aggregator, which selects most recent information from various other news outlets including both free and subscription based news outlets such as PR Leap, Dow Jones. It offers the choice of sorting the results by date and time of publication.

The News Archive Search covers the last 200 years. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together in a timeline. The Advanced Search option allows you to specify the date range and restrict your search to a particular source.

There are many more features on offer such as:

  • Google sites is a web page creation tool as a part of Google Apps. It allow any user to create simple usable websites which can be used for sharing resources within groups or publish over the World Wide Web.
  • Google Earth is a virtual globe map and geographical information provide by Google with the use of data from NASA Space Shuttle missions which provides 3D terrain data for the entire land surface of the Earth. Recently, they have also added a feature that allow users to monitor traffic speeds. You may need to download software to run, and it's free for personal use.
  • Google Docs has been upgraded to Google drive. Is a web base service with data storage facilities and it also allows multiple users to create and edit documents online.
  • Google Scholar is a search engine which can search full text of scholar literatures across all databases regardless of commercial or free access.

These are only a few of the many products Google have developed. The full list of products and features Google offers is available from: http://www.google.co.uk/options/ or fin it here .

Google, (2010). Blog Search FAQ[online]. Google. http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42541 [Accessed on 20/05/2012]